


before the world catches up

by prinsipe



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ghosts, Ghost Akashi, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-01
Updated: 2015-03-01
Packaged: 2018-03-15 21:23:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3462554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prinsipe/pseuds/prinsipe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s a ghost in his window. Normally, this won’t bother Tetsuya, but this ghost doesn’t go <em>away.</em> He’s there when Tetsuya wakes up, still as a picture with the mosaic of his skin caught in the frosted glass. He’s got a hand on it, too, not much larger than Tetsuya’s own.</p><p>Tetsuya stares, and the ghost blinks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	before the world catches up

**Author's Note:**

> title from "collar full" by panic! at the disco. i have never, _ever_ written akakuro before, but i was bored in class, and voila!
> 
> constructive criticism is, as always, welcomed with open arms.

There’s a ghost in his window. Normally, this won’t bother Tetsuya, but this ghost doesn’t go  _away_. He’s there when Tetsuya wakes up, still as a picture with the mosaic of his skin caught in the frosted glass. He’s got a hand on it, too, not much larger than Tetsuya’s own.

Tetsuya stares, and the ghost blinks.

.

.

He has red eyes.

.

.

Tetsuya is playing chess when the phone call comes. He’s three moves away from victory. Tetsuya takes a moment to think how it comes easier,  _weaker_ —Daiki was a bad opponent, but playing against himself is even worse. He can’t tell what Daiki would have done, anymore.

Tetsuya lets out a breath that stays for a moment before it leaves, and makes a mental note to adjust the heater. It had never been a problem before, he thinks. Without Daiki, the room has enough space to eat him alive. He doesn’t care.

The phone rings again, and the room bares its teeth. Standing, Tetsuya picks it up.

“The money—”

“He’s dead,” Tetsuya says into the speaker, watches the fog repeat his words.  _It really is too damn cold_. “I don’t know what he owed you, but he doesn’t anymore.”

He doesn’t even take a minute to listen to the static before putting the phone down. He’s too cold and too tired to think about anything.

When Tetsuya returns to the chess board, some of the pieces across from him have been moved.

.

.

It’s checkmate, of course.

.

.

“What’s your name?” Tetsuya says to the silence. The window’s a little open, and outside, an ice-knife hangs and grows. Crystals cling to the inside of the walls. It’s silly, he’s silly, Tetsuya thinks—ghosts don’t have names. Then again, Tetsuya doesn’t seem to be right about anything, anymore.

(People don’t live forever. Daiki is—was—no exception.)

He doesn’t play chess that night, only sleeps.

.

.

When he wakes up, the window is closed, and a name writes itself in the fog.

.

.

_Seijuro._

.

.

The boy (the ghost?) has nice handwriting, sharp and clear, something Tetsuya has come to notice as the product of a wealthy upbringing. He thinks of the chess game.

“Are you lonely?” Tetsuya asks without needing an answer. It’s warm, almost pleasantly, and flickers show him a boy with red hair and red eyes. He’s wearing a suit, and if Tetsuya looks closely, he’s smiling. It’s not a happy one, Tetsuya knows.

“Of course,” Tetsuya says, answering his own question. He doesn’t understand why some people (beings?) aren’t able to cross the threshold between dead and alive, and understands _less_ about why the threshold exists in the first place.  _Of course it’s lonely._  He’s come to think of ghosts as bits of thread without forming a whole. In a way, it’s frightening. He can’t think of what it would be like to waver between black and white, swept into the net of a gray area.

He tries to think about what it’s like to be a ghost—there are no names, no obligations. He wonders if ghosts have any memories of what life was like, wonders what their current life (that’s not the right word at all, he knows), and theorizes that it’s kind of like watching a movie play out in front of them.

Tetsuya is envious.

.

.

He wakes up early, and on a trip to the bathroom, he glimpses a note on the fridge. He surprises himself by being able to read it—Daiki’s chicken scratch is painful to look at it and even worse to read.

It’s a shopping list, dated two days before The Occurrence, dated two days before Daiki decided to take a friend’s patrol.

Tetsuya throws it out.

.

.

He doesn’t remember falling asleep, doesn’t remember moving to the couch. It doesn’t matter; he wakes up with a blanket around his shoulders all the same. There are glints caged in the slivers of glass. Tetsuya sees red.

When he huddles into the blanket, Tetsuya sees a different ghost.

.

.

The ghost ( _Seijuro_ , he reminds himself) is playing piano when Tetsuya wake up. The instrument is probably old enough to be his grandmother, but neither he nor Daiki got around to teaching themselves how to play it. Daiki thought it’d be a brilliant idea to buy adecrepit piano for no good reason other than the fact that it was cheap and, at the time, pretty. Tetsuya’s sure it belongs in the museum, and not his living room.

(Daiki liked looking at it. Tetsuya _doesn’t_ like looking at it—it’s like a punch to the gut, and the last thing he needs is something that makes it even harder to breathe.)

Even though he hasn’t turned the thermostat up, it’s warm enough for him to leave the blanket on the couch instead of dragging it around. Tetsuya stands in front of the piano. Seijuro doesn’t look at him, only the keys. His fingers are slender, but a little too small for the piano.

“Do you know how to play lullabies?” Tetsuya asks.

The song that follows speaks for itself.

.

.

Seijuro plays something else that night. He’s better at chess than Tetsuya and Daiki combined.

.

.

Tetsuya remembers to check the thermostat before bed. The temperature is higher than he left it.

.

.

The phone rings again, and Tetsuya throws it to the floor and steps on it until he’s left with a collage of broken pieces.

.

.

A ghost is not enough to fill the space Daiki left behind. The room is warm, but Tetsuya isn’t, and he sleeps the rest of the day away. He’s alone with a carcass, a skeleton, and something that isn’t alive, isn’t enough to fill the skin.

“Are you?” Tetsuya asks, half-delirious. “Are you real?”

Seijuro doesn’t answer.

.

.

The cold medicine by his bed is real enough, and Tetsuya cries for the first time since The Occurrence.

.

.

_A twenty-three year old cop was found dead at the scene. The police are investigating the scene, but the body has been confirmed to be that of—_

.

.

He hears someone’s voice outside of the apartment, in front of the door. It takes him a moment to recognize there are two voices. The first one is his landlady. The second is the voice on the other side of the phoneline.

“Kuroko? He’s—”

Tetsuya locks the door and shuts the lights off before returning to his bed, heart surging against the cavity of his chest.

He remembers to breathe.

.

.

Tetsuya sets up a chessboard and waits before playing against himself when none of the pieces move on their own.

.

.

There are footsteps on the stairs, making their way up to Tetsuya’s floor. They sound kind of pretty (not as pretty as the songs Seijuro plays, of course), moving in the rhythm of a heart beat so fast it almost,  _almost_ matches Tetsuya’s own. He walks to the counter and feels around in the drawer for a knife, hands barely managing to grab one.

On the other side of the door, close enough that Tetsuya can feel a smile that makes him want to rip his skin off, there is laughter. “Kuroko. May I come in?”

“Give me a moment,” Tetsuya says, marvels at how he can still talk. The knife is in his back pocket.

He opens the door, backing away when Makoto forces himself inside. He smells like sweat and iron. Tetsuya wants to hit him until he bleeds.

“Nice place,” Makoto Hanamiya says, but he’s eyeing Tetsuya, not the room.

"Thank you.” Tetsuya makes it apparent that he doesn’t mean it. He’s not aware he’s continuing to step back until Makoto steps close enough to seal the space between them. Cold air from the open window cries between his walls, makes Tetsuya shiver as much as the man in front of him.

“The money,” says Makoto, grinning like a skull. “Where is it?”

“I told you. Aomine would have had it, and I don’t know.” Tetsuya looks him in the eye, feels for the knife peeking above the top edge of his back pockets.

“Then you can pay it for him,” Makoto says, as if he’s doing Tetsuya a favour. He’s hiding secrets, somewhere, and Tetsuya doesn’t want to know what they are. “You can pay it in the same way he did, too.”

It’s then that Tetsuya notices the sheen of a gun.

Wrenching the knife out of his back pocket, Tetsuya nearly screams before a single bang beats him to it.

Makoto slumps to the floor, and behind him, Tetsuya sees his broken lamp.

The landlady calls the police when Tetsuya can’t.

.

.

He doesn’t have to look to know the chessboard pieces have moved.

.

.

There’s a ghost in his window. Normally, this won’t bother Tetsuya, but this ghost doesn’t go  _away_. He presses his hand against the glass, and Tetsuya does too.

(If he tries hard enough, he can feel warm skin instead of glass.)

“You don’t have to,” Tetsuya says. “You don’t have to watch me anymore.”

He isn’t sure if Seijuro is smiling, but they both close their eyes.

When Tetsuya opens them, Seijuro is gone.


End file.
